History moves on and you can’t really turn it back.

Unless you're a Palestinian Arab, of course. Palestinian revanchism after 75 years has little more to recommend it than Zionist revanchism after 2000.

Not that Asimov was wrong. Israel may be a bad idea whose time had come. Israel was a kinder/gentler (to the Jews, anyway) final solution to the West's Jewish problem: Let the Jews resettle themselves in the East. The Arabs were a notch lower on the Western ethnic totem pole than the Jews, so the Jews got the Arabs' land.

Colonialism is all about the cultural fecklessness of the colonized. Modernity was always there for the Arabs to embrace. They had five centuries to get over being kicked out of Spain. Five hundred years to learn to invent or manufacture or finance or consult. Five hundred years to separate church and state. Five hundred years to learn to govern themselves. And five hundred years to arm themselves against colonizers. But they did none of that. So they lost their land.

And so it goes. Hari Seldon would have seen the Europeans and their Jews coming.